#2645: Jill Carnahan

Yes, it’s functional medicine again, and functional medicine remains one of the most insidious (and cynically marketed) branches of quackery there is. Now, it is admittedly somewhat tricky to determine precisely what functional medicine is supposed to be, as it tends to be defined in terms of vague, largely metaphoric terms like “taking a whole-patient perspective” and “imbalances” in hormones and neurotransmitters, rather than anything that lends itself to precise and accountable investigation and assessment (i.e. it means what functional medicine providers want it to mean), but at least it tends to encompass vast arrays of unproven and disproven treatments backed by pseudoscience, anecdotes, intuition (i.e practitioner’s trusting their own judgment) and conspiracy theories, often made up as they goalong. A characteristic of functional medicine, though (the claim to focus on “root causes” is something it shares with most brances of woo), besides making loose and unjustified claims about alleged interactions between the environment and the gastrointestinal, endocrine, and immune systems, is practitioners’ tendency to prescribe useless and expensive tests, which they then use, based on the above-mentioned methods (intuition, pseudoscience and conspiracy theory), to construct “individualized treatment plans” – ‘individualized’ here used mostly to avoid accountability; ‘invoice-based’ would be more accurate). Most insidiously, though, the quackery that is functional medicine has powerful backers: the Cleveland Clinic, for instance, has sported a Center for Functional Medicine since 2014 because the administrators there have realized there’s good money in it – after all, functional medicine often sounds professional and it’s tailor-made to drain its victims of as much money as practitioners can sustain (the plans are “individualized”, remember). There are decent primers on functional medicine here and here.)

 

One particular strand of quackery that has been popular with functional medicine practitioners for a while, is dubious (so as to avoid using the word ‘fraudulent’) MTHFR genetic mutation testing; that is, getting patients to test for “mutations” in the MTHFR gene via direct-to-consumer genetic testing, the results of which the quacks, hucksters and deluded woomeisters can then use to prescribe (inefficacious) dietary supplements supposed to ward off the purportedly deleterious effects of these “mutations”. It’s a bald-faced scam. According to Jill Carnahan, an MD who also holds a certification from the Institute for Functional Medicine, however, “this common genetic mutation [can affect] everything from depression and anxiety to risk of heart attack or stroke”. Carnahan, of course, has her own line of “Dr. Jill” brand dietary supplements for sale.

 

Given her credentials, it is not particularly surprising that Carnahan was quick to try to cynically monetize the Covid-19 pandemic with false and misleading claims about the pandemic clearly aimed to direct customers to her supplement store. According to Carnahan’s marketing materials from early 2020 (titled “Worried About Coronavirus? What You Need to Know to Protect Yourself”), “[s]upplements are one of the most potent ways to give your body a boost and drastically improve its ability to fight off infection,” and her list of relevant supplements helpfully included hyperlinks to her online store. Apparently, antioxidants was the key, as Carnahan saw it. One is probably forgiven, given the general standards among functional medicine practitioners, for suspecting that she just so happened to be in the possession some leftover inventory from back when antioxidants had its heyday as fashion supplement woo a decade ago. The FTC was not impressed.

 

Diagnosis: Trite as ever.